Transdisciplinary research (TDR) is increasingly promoted in current science policy. It is expected to address complex societal issues while both being democratically just and challenging deep-seated epistemological assumptions. The rising emphasis on accountability and evaluation in science has led to a growing literature on TDR evaluation over the last 15 years. Existing reviews of this literature often aim to synthesize results into general overarching evaluation frameworks. However, these reviews have paid limited attention to the normative assumptions embedded within evaluation criteria. This risks smoothing over deep-seated conflicts regarding values and goals in TDR. In this paper, we qualitatively analyse a systematically identified corpus of 58 peer-reviewed articles to uncover the underlying normative assumptions that are prominent in the TDR evaluation literature. We identify four distinct discourses: Justification, providing explanation and motivation for TDR; Integration, focusing on the epistemological dimension of TDR; Impact, aiming to better understand how TDR leads to societal effects; and Metrics, indicators of TDR effects. We argue that the dominance of the Impact discourse risks overlooking the epistemological ambitions of TDR, while the consensus-oriented Integration discourse risks smoothing over pluralism and minimizing heterodox views among participants. Both funders and evaluators of TDR must be aware of and reflect on the implications of their normative assumptions for the specific contexts in which they operate. Our results can serve as a conceptual tool that helps navigate the complexities and assumptions of TDR evaluation.

This paper explores the evolving role of health economics within economic research and publishing over the past 30 years. Historically, largely a niche field, health economics has become increasingly prominent, with the share of health economics papers in top journals growing significantly. We aim to identify the factors behind this rise. Using a combination of bibliometric methods and natural language processing (NLP), we classify abstracts to define health economics. Adapting NLP methods to evaluate the novelty, impact, and quality of academic papers, we demonstrate that the mainstreaming of health economics is driven by innovative, high-quality research, with two notable waves in quality ratings that highlight the emergence and impact of distinct subfields within the discipline. We find a strong positive correlation between citations and quality ratings, with health economics papers receiving fewer citations for their quality compared to other economics fields. Pandemic-related research received a high number of citations during 2020 and 2021; however, our findings indicate that this work was not systematically more novel or impactful than prior studies within the same subfield. 

Traditionally, the bibliometric community has relied heavily on secondary data sources, most prominently the Science Citation Index. By analyzing three key journals, we detected trends in the data sources used over a 45-year period (1978-2022). The historical analysis of data sources reveals a consistency in the materials used as well as bursts of new materials and approaches. On a larger scale, the pattern is stable with Web of Science and Scopus dominating, but this might be about to change. The complexity of the research performed in bibliometrics does not seem to increase as a vast majority of studies use one or two types of data sources despite the increasing availability of data. A more detailed analysis detects trends in the use of data, as represented by patent analyses in the 1980s, webometrics in the late 1990s, and altmetrics in the 2010s. Overall, the paper provides an analytical overview of current and historical data sources used in bibliometrics, which may guide and inspire further research. The question remaining, however, is how the current emphasis on open sources will transform the field in the future: are we entering the great wide open, or will established proprietary databases remain a dominating source?

Introduction. This paper analyses the presence of the journal Information Research in traditional citation databases, such as Web of Science, as well as in new open sources like OpenAlex; and services tracking policy and technological impact, such as SciVal and Overton.

Method. We analyse the visibility of the journal across sources. With the limitations of representation in the different sources we proceed to study the impact of the journal in the scholarly community, as well as in society, by looking at how Information Research papers are situated in the scholarly world and how they are cited in patents and policy papers. Finally, we look at the openness of the journal as seen through the data sources.

Results. Our results show that Information Research has made quite a journey. It has found a place in the scholarly universe: authors from institutions from around the world publish there and other prestigious journals cite the content. The content coverage in the perused data sources could be improved, as can metadata, for example markup of article types.

Conclusions. Whilst the journal has been openly available on the Internet throughout its history, this is not well reflected in the data sources. This is something that the new home, Publicera.kb.se, might help with. Larger platforms can help individual journals fulfil the data standards needed to be properly indexed in the large data sources.

In a paper published in 2020, Philip McCann gives a qualitative overview of "the Nordic contribution to regional science", which, however, only includes contributions by Swedish regional science researchers. The purpose of this paper is to complement McCann's overview by highlighting Nordic contributions to regional science in the period 1983-2022 through a bibliometric analysis of publications in a set of thirteen regional science journals indexed in Web of Science, using several standard bibliometric tools. Our most interesting and surprising result is that the number of "Nordic" publications in the chosen set of journals has grown more than six times faster than the total number of publications in these journals between 1983-1992 and 2013-2022. This implies that the "Nordic" regional science researchers have increased their "market share" from 1.9 to 9.1 per cent. During the same period, the share of co-authored papers increased from 50.0 to 82.9 per cent and the share of international co-authorships increased from 0 to 50.0 per cent and went from being a mainly intra-European activity to a global activity. This process is also reflected in a certain international influence on the research topics during the four periods analysed, but to a considerable extent it seems that the Nordic regional scientists have pursued their own Nordic research themes. In terms of individual research productivity, there was the expected skewed distribution with a small number of researchers with a large research output. At the institutional level, there were notable changes in the ranking of institutions in terms of number of authorships, but one institution-Ume & aring; University-ranked among the Nordic top-2 in all four periods.

The All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI) was launched by the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1952. Soon it developed into a grandiose system which served researchers and engineers throughout the USSR. Here we describe its inception, the way it was structured, and how it relates to similar grand visions of how to organise knowledge. The history of VINITI provides rare insights into a partly alternative history of how scientific information was organised in the latter half of the 20th century. Based on available sources in English and Russian, we consider the ideas behind this grand initiative for acquiring international literature, as well as how it was received and presented to a foreign audience. In this effort we put particular emphasis on the first 25 years of VINITI (1952–1977) while at the same time focusing on central ideas in its organisation such as “enrichment”, abstracting and pre-printing. Overall, the activities of VINITI can today appear as both old fashioned, bordering on the utopian, and as visionary and modern in its abandonment of journals and traditional forms of peer review.

It is well known that rankings play a central role in economics. Economists use rankings as evaluative devices to assess people, papers, and journals in a range of situations from informal everyday judgements to the consequential assessments involved in academic hiring. In this chapter, we attempt to move from an observation of the ubiquity of rankings in economics to a theoretical reflection on possible explanations. We chart the recent historical development of the field-specific preoccupation we call the ranking syndrome and provide examples from several recent empirical studies of Scandinavian Economics. Our conceptual discussion draws on the literature to assess different tentative models of explanation, including the general heterogeneity and contingency of social processes of valuation from valuation studies, the notion of reactivity of rankings from the organizational evaluation literature, the concepts of classification situations and ordinalization as a mode of social classification, and the performativity of economics from the sociology of knowledge. Overall, the chapter charts theoretical approaches available to explain the ubiquity of rankings in economics while identifying approaches for further empirical research and strategies for addressing the ranking syndrome. 

This paper pays homage to Professor Börje Johansson’s scientific contributions in general and to the field of regional science particularly through a bibliometric approach, highlighting his publishing and citation record, co-authors and co-editors, as well as his theoretical inspirators, fellow researchers and often cited researchers. 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, effective handling of scientific information was identified as crucial for advancement and international competitiveness. Here, we study how the Soviet Union, through the founding of The All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), developed its own grandiose system which served researchers and engineers throughout the USSR. By studying its inception, the way it was structured, and how it relates to similar grand visions of how to organise knowledge, we provide rare insights into a partly alternative history of how scientific information was organised in the latter half of the 20th century. Based on available sources in English and Russian, we consider the ideas behind this grand initiative for acquiring international literature, as well as how it was received and presented to a foreign audience. In this effort, we put particular emphasis on the first 25 years of VINITI (1952–1977) while at the same time focusing on central ideas in its organisation such as “enrichment”, “abstracting” and “pre-printing”. A key principle emerging from our analysis is how the notion of concentration becomes a fundamental principle for its operations. Overall, the activities of VINITI can today appear as both old-fashioned, bordering on the utopian, and as visionary and modern in its abandonment of journals and traditional forms of peer review.